DEATH ON THE CNN CURVE

By Lisa Belkin;

Published: July 23, 1995

IT WAS FAME that killed Robert O'Donnell, killed him as surely as that shotgun blast he fired into his brain on a dark, dusty, West Texas road, miles and years away from the thing that made him famous in the first place. Technically, it was the bullet that did it -- a .410 shell, the kind his mother kept at the ranch house to shoot rattlesnakes and warn trespassers. It certainly wasn't an accident. You can't shoot yourself in the mouth accidentally with a .410. The barrel is too long. And it wasn't someone else's doing. He left three notes, lined up side by side by the coffee table, two to his two boys and one that simply said, "No help from nobody but family."

So it was the bullet, or depression, or his willful trigger finger that caused his death, this spring, at the age of 37. But the reason he did it, and the reason no one who knew him was surprised, that is where the fame comes in. Eight years earlier he had saved a little girl's life, as the whole world watched, and, for a while, he was the center not only of his small universe, but of the real, known universe, the new one that sees everything simultaneously on CNN. There was a parade, countless television appearances, a letter from the president, a handshake from the Vice President, a made-for-TV movie. But eventually, the cameras went away, the world's attention moved on and he was left alone -- a man so changed by fame that he no longer belonged in his world, but not changed enough that he could leave that world behind.

O'Donnell was not the only one. The little girl's parents moved her out of town, to a three-bedroom house that they never could have afforded before she was rescued, to hide from the world that embraced them so hard they couldn't breathe. Eventually, they were divorced. Others who helped to save the child -- O'Donnell was just the most visible of hundreds -- found themselves drinking, or in marriage counseling, or in legal tangles, all because of the fickle, seductive, burning spotlight.

"It was the greatest moment of Robert's life and it was the worst thing that ever happened to him," said his mother.

Most of all, it is a cautionary tale for a time when Capt. Scott O'Grady, plucked from enemy territory in Bosnia, leaves his hospital bed to appear live with Larry King, and an Oklahoma surgeon, after spending an hour amputating a woman's leg to free her from the rubble of a bombed Federal building, emerges to spend a week giving almost nonstop interviews. In the days before he died, Robert O'Donnell, like most of the rest of the country at the time, was tuned to the coverage of the Oklahoma City rescue effort on television. He had wanted to go to Oklahoma himself, to try to do something to help, maybe to be a hero again, but he didn't have enough money for the trip. He was quiet while he watched, his mother remembers, but, after several hours he said something she will never forget. Pointing to a wide shot of the rescue workers, he shook his head and said, "Those people are going to need a lot of help for a very long time."

EVEN IF YOU DON'T RECOGNIZE ROBERT O'Donnell's name, odds are you know what he did. He was the paramedic who snaked himself down a tomblike tunnel and freed 18-month-old Jessica McClure, who had got stuck 22 feet underground in an abandoned water well.

He was at work the morning of Oct. 14, 1987, when he first heard about the ongoing rescue, and since he was assigned to the other side of Midland, he had no reason to think it would have anything to do with him. His was an ordinary life at the time. He was 1 of about 50 Midland firefighters with paramedic training, a job he enjoyed but easily left at the end of the day. He was married to the blond, effervescent Robbie Martin, whom he fell for in high school, and together they had Casey, then 7 years old, and Chance, 3. On weekends he coached Casey's soccer team, and played for hours in the yard with both his boys. Once or twice a month he was blinded by a migraine, and he would spend the day in bed, with the shades drawn to block the light. He raced motorcycles. He favored Dr. Pepper and Copenhagen chewing tobacco. There was nothing about him that the world would be likely to notice.

By the morning of Oct. 15, Jessica was still trapped in the well, and Robert, who had just gone off duty, thought he could help. He drove to the rescue site on Tanner Street, through a neighborhood of tiny houses and tiny yards, a neighborhood where people lived because they could not afford other parts of town. He had to circle for a while before he found a place to park, because a small city had sprung up along the normally quiet streets. He then made his way by foot to 3309 Tanner, past the television satellite trucks, the telephone company installers adding extra lines, the contortionist from Dallas who hoped to squeeze himself down the well. Tucked in a corner of the nondescript backyard was a black metal pipe, three inches poking up from the ground and eight inches in diameter, small enough to all but wrap your hands around, and, incomprehensibly, big enough to swallow a little girl. Around that pipe were the people and equipment assigned to monitor and maintain Jessica: a hose delivering oxygen, another blowing heated air, a microphone from a local oil safety company. Andy Glasscock, a police officer and one of the first rescuers on the scene, spent most of the three days lying on his stomach and listening for sounds from that microphone, hearing Jessica sing nursery rhymes to herself, call for "Mama" and cry. Glasscock, craggy-faced with tobacco stains on his teeth and more than a little steel gray in his thick mustache, cried himself, as he thought of his own small children. "How does a kitten go?" he would call down into the darkness, and he held his breath until he heard her say, "Meow."

By the time O'Donnell arrived, volunteers also had dug a shaft parallel to the one that held Jessica, one barely wide enough to hold a grown man and a drill, and 29 feet deep. The next step was to create a cross-tunnel, but the five feet of rock separating the shaft from the well proved to be so hard that it rapidly dulled diamond-tipped drills. Even with improved machinery, progress came at the rate of an inch an hour. The drills and jackhammers bounced off the stone, as if hitting steel. Men were dragged out exhausted from the effort.

They weren't the only ones exhausted. Looking over the shoulders of the group monitoring Jessica, and the group trying to reach her, were the reporters. The ones who arrived earliest, mostly from local newspapers and television stations, were only a few feet away from the two holes, just on the other side of the weatherworn wooden fence. Those who came next quickly realized they needed ladders, and those who came later brought even higher ladders.

Once territory was staked with a ladder, it had to be protected. Leaving for the bathroom meant risking a prime spot, unless you found someone to guard your ladder while you were gone. For blocks around the site, neighbors filled every available coffeepot and left them on their front stoops for the reporters, along with boxes of doughnuts, sandwiches and cold drinks. Some let strangers with press passes use their showers, sleep on their couches, borrow their telephones. The ones who arrived near the end had no hope of actually fitting into the yard or seeing anything firsthand. They sat in nearby living rooms and watched events unfold on television, then called their editors with updates that were really unnecessary since their editors were also tuned to CNN.

Robert O'Donnell inched through the crowd in the backyard, found his chief and offered his assistance. He did not leave that yard again until 8 o'clock the following night, and, when he did, he left a part of himself behind.

"I think if he could have, if he had it to do over again," his brother Ricky would say, after Robert's funeral, "he would have stayed home and let somebody else help that kid."

But it wasn't somebody else. It was Robert O'Donnell. At noon on the third day, the drillers stopped, the reporters clung to their ladders and everybody watched as O'Donnell, with a mining light strapped to his head, was lowered by a cable harness down the shaft. He was chosen because he was tall and thin -- 6 feet, 145 pounds. He didn't mention he was also claustrophobic. He lay down on his back and wriggled head first through the cross-tunnel, with his arms out in front of him. The air was wet and sticky, and within moments he was bathed in sweat. It was like trying to slither through a tightly wrapped sleeping bag, he would tell reporters later.

He inched to the end of the tunnel, until he could look up at the shaft that held Jessica. Only the first few feet were lined with the pipe that protruded up into the yard; the rest was raw rock wall. One of Jessica's feet was dangling down toward Robert, but the other was out of his sight, wedged near her head, so she was almost in a split. "Juicy, I'm here to help you," he said, using the nickname her parents had told him to use. He asked her to move her leg and she did. Satisfied that she probably had no overwhelming spinal injuries, he started to tug on her foot, but she didn't budge. She was wedged in too tight, and he did not have enough room to maneuver. He cursed. He prayed. He became resigned to the fact that he would have to leave so that the diggers could widen the tunnel. He promised her he would come back.

He almost wasn't allowed to make a second try. Doctors on the scene worried that he was "too distraught," but he insisted. When he reached the end of the tunnel again, he coated the walls near Jessica's dangling foot with K-Y lubricating jelly, and started pulling, moving her a fraction of an inch at a time. Finally, he gave one last pull and she was lying in the tunnel with him, nose to nose.

"You're out, Juicy," he said, then maneuvered her out of the tunnel and into the shaft, where Steve Forbes, another fire department paramedic, waited with a backboard used to immobilize accident victims who might have hidden injuries. O'Donnell had worked with Forbes countless times before, and considered the quiet, unassuming Forbes a friend, although, they would soon learn that, in many fundamental ways, they were very different.

Steve and Jessica were lifted from the shaft, up the 29 feet toward the waiting world. She reached the top, wrapped in gauze, and was immediately surrounded. A local photographer, standing in the basket of a cherry picker borrowed from the local telephone company, took the photograph, the one that won the Pulitzer Prize. All three networks interrupted their regular programming to cover the moment. "Live and direct from Midland, Texas," said Dan Rather. "Jessica McClure is up. She's alive. What a fighter."

O'Donnell stayed in the tunnel for a few moments, collecting himself. "I was totally exhausted," he would say. "Totally elated, too. I've saved other people's lives before, but they'll never be anything like this again."

When he emerged, church bells were ringing all over Midland. The phone in his home was ringing, too. The first call was from a radio station in New York City, and, every time he finished an interview and put the receiver back in the cradle, it rang again. That night he developed a migraine; his wife, Robbie, pulled the telephone plug so he could sleep. When he woke up the next morning and plugged the phone back in, it began ringing immediately.

MIDLAND IS A CITY OF 100,000 PEOPLE IN the middle of nowhere. Even its name speaks to its remoteness -- a land roughly midway between El Paso and Fort Worth, about 300 miles from each. Nature made it dry and flat, with rust-colored earth and a white-blue sky. Man has not embellished it much. It is a sprawl of fast-food restaurants, gun shops, places that sell pickups and places that fix them. It is perfectly in character to find a sign in the lobby of the police station asking, "Please do not empty your tobacco residue in the water fountain." If not for the oil, there would be no one in Midland. They certainly don't stay here for the scenery.

By the 1970's, oil prices started to rise, quadrupling to $40 a barrel, and in the early 1980's, Midland boasted of having the country's highest density of millionaires. There were as many private jets at the airport as there were commercial ones, the locals liked to boast, and it became a challenge to do simple things, like get an appointment with your dentist, because the dentist was likely to have gone off to drill for oil. By the mid-1980's, however, the price of oil began its free fall, and Midland went down with it. O'Donnell, who had been a draftsman for the City Service Oil Company, now defunct, went to work for the fire department, and felt lucky to have found the job.

In October 1987, the oil bust meant Midland's economy was depressed, and so were its people Then a little girl fell down a well, and the thing they knew how to do best -- bore down into the ground and bring something precious back up -- that was the one thing that needed doing. The primary goal, of course, was to save one little girl. But as the hours passed, the drama developed a deeper symbolism, a mythology only loosely related to fact. And in the weeks and months afterward it would transform from a simple good deed into a legend, until it began to feel like they saved all of Midland, maybe even all of Texas, when they saved Jessica McClure.

Not quite 40 years before Jessica McClure fell into an abandoned well, another little girl, 3-year-old Kathy Fiscus, did the same thing in California. She was running a race with her sister and her cousin in a field in a suburb of Los Angeles in 1949 when she slipped into a 14-inch-wide hole and became trapped 95 feet underground. Her cries, too, could be heard from the surface and there was a mammoth rescue effort -- 132 volunteers worked for two days, while more than 5,000 people came to watch. Finally, after 49 hours, Kathy Fiscus was found dead. Apparently she died a few hours after her fall.

The story of Kathy Fiscus was worldwide news in 1949. Newspapers in London and Stockholm held their editions until her fate was known. Radio reporters brought word from the scene in hushed, dramatic voices. Thousands huddled around black-and-white sets watching KTLA-Channel 5, the first TV station in Los Angeles. But the difference between then and now was a difference of immediacy and numbers. Thousands watched for word of Kathy Fiscus, and what they saw was someone telling them what had happened, not showing them what was happening, since the perfection of the live TV remote was well in the future. Millions watched Jessica McClure, and they saw events as they happened. During the last minutes of her rescue, 3.1 million households were tuned to CNN alone. Those millions of people felt they were there. In a way, they were there. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a moving picture is worth many times that, and a live moving picture makes an emotional connection that goes deeper than logic and lasts well beyond the actual event. "Everybody in America became godfathers and godmothers of Jessica while this was going on," Ronald Reagan told Jessica's parents, Chip and Reba (Cissy) McClure, in a telephone call shortly after the rescue. He placed the call from Nancy Reagan's hospital room, where she had just told she had breast cancer. She refused to leave her room for her biopsy, she told Chip and Cissy, "until I watched her come up."

This was before correspondents reported live from the enemy capital while American bombs were falling. Before Saddam Hussein held a surreal press conference with a few of the hundreds of Americans he was holding hostage. Before the nation watched, riveted but powerless, as Los Angeles was looted and burned. Before O. J. Simpson took a slow ride in a white Bronco, and before everyone close to his case had an agent and a book contract. This was uncharted territory just a short time ago, and it was left to the McClures, Andy Glasscock, Steve Forbes, Robert O'Donnell and the besieged city of Midland, Tex., to figure out how to handle it.

It was a lot to handle. Suddenly everyone wanted to give things to Jessica. She spent 36 days in Midland Memorial Hospital, undergoing six surgeries for severe forehead and right-foot wounds, eventually having her smallest toe removed, and all her doctors -- the pediatricians, general practitioners, vascular surgeons and orthopedic surgeons -- donated their time. The rest of her bill, about $50,000, was paid by anonymous donors. During her stay, the hospital received an average of 50 calls an hour. Her room, the hallway outside her room and, eventually, the entire hospital, were filled with stuffed bears, elephants, balloons, flowers and baskets of fruit. The Walt Disney Company sent a 5-foot-tall Winnie the Pooh, along with an invitation to visit Disneyland as their guest. The Federal Express box that brought the bear was signed by Fedex employees at every stop along the way. Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and his wife, Matilda, sent a stuffed beaver, which is New York's official animal. When the toy store found out who it was for, they donated a Garfield the Cat.

A well-wisher in Vienna sent a chocolate cake. Someone closer to home shipped Jessica a custom-made water bed. A Shar-Pei puppy, which she named Shirley, was also a gift. She received enough clothing to last until she was 5. She was invited to the Vatican, for an audience with the Pope, to throw out the first ball at the Texas Rangers' home opener, and to Washington to be the Grand Marshal of the National Independence Day Parade.

Money poured into a trust fund established for her at a Midland bank, an account that today is estimated to be worth more than $700,000 by people close to the family, although the McClures have never officially released a figure. The Reagans sent an undisclosed amount. Jeanne Yate's third-grade class in Wellston, Okla., sold birdseed for 50 cents a bag and sent Jessica $421. Chip McClure tried to keep a computerized list of all the mail, and eventually it exceeded 60,000 names.

While Jessica was still in the hospital, Midland held a parade, to honor her and all the people who helped rescue her. They called it "A Salute to Jessica's Heroes." Between 35,000 and 40,000 people lined the eight blocks of downtown -- more than one-third of the city's population. Past her window rode the 400-plus people who had a part in her rescue. No one, it seems, was left out. O'Donnell rode with Forbes on top of the ambulance that brought Jessica to the hospital. Cherry pickers from the telephone company carried the directory assistance workers who fielded the onslaught of calls to the city. The drilling rig that first dug the parallel shaft was on display in the parade, as were the thermal-imaging camera used to watch Jessica while she was in the hole, and the vibraphone used to listen to her. A flatbed truck followed, filled to overflowing with stuffed animals. At a ceremony after the parade, the McClures gave autographed pictures to all 400 volunteers, and let them take their pick from the truckload of toys. Robert chose a bear for Casey and a smaller stuffed animal for Chance.

The attention heaped on the McClures trickled down to the central players in the rescue. Andy Glasscock was seen in the Michael Jackson video "Man in the Mirror," which included flashes of major news events. Forbes and O'Donnell each received a wall full of citations and plaques, and O'Donnell was asked to serve as a judge for the "G.I. Joe Search for Real American Heroes," and to attend the White House awards ceremony for that program. Not only was he a guest when Oprah Winfrey brought her show to Midland but he also sat next to her at the press conference beforehand. He was invited to speak at so many firefighter conventions around the country that he developed a slide presentation. Forbes and O'Donnell and their wives were flown to Los Angeles to appear on the television program "3rd Degree," where a celebrity panel tries to guess what two seemingly unrelated individuals have in common. The panelists knew immediately who they were.

A 4-foot-by-6-foot plaque was hung on the wall of the Midland Center, a bronze rendition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, with O'Donnell's likeness added, even though he was underground when the picture was taken. An area a few blocks away was renamed "Volunteer Park." At the actual site of the rescue, an iron plate was welded over the pipe, with the inscription, "For Jessica, With Love From All of Us." In an emotional ceremony, the rescuers, including O'Donnell, planted a redbud seedling surrounded by a ring of lavender chrysanthemum over the refilled parallel shaft.

I FIRST MET ROBERT O'DONNELL WHEN THINGS were starting to get ugly. The earliest, most visible sign that the euphoria was crumbling came in early spring, when the rescuers, tantalized by competing offers from movie producers, formed two rival associations. One, called the McClure Rescue Association, was made up of public employees including O'Donnell, who was the president, Steve Forbes, and the chiefs of the fire and police departments. The other, the Jessica McClure Rescuers' Association, was made up of 37 volunteers, the ones who brought the equipment and the brute strength to the operation. Each group had its own set of bylaws, with rules about what percentage of the vote was required to admit a new member, and what percentage of any eventual profits the various members would get. Each also had its own lawyer. And each agreed on three things: that it was a shame that they had to fight like this, that their group's story was the story and that they were interested only in the quality of the movie; it was the others, they said, who were interested only in the money.

I had moved to Texas in November 1987, a month after the rescue, to cover the state as a correspondent for The New York Times. It wasn't only the rescuers who were caught up in the mythology then; the press corps was pretty proud of itself, too. In Houston, where I was based, it was a badge of valor to have survived the grueling coverage, and local reporters who had flown from Houston to Midland spoke with feigned nonchalance of how, after more than two days without sleep, they would start seeing flashing lights and moving shapes that were not really there.

So when the heroes began squabbling, it was big news. I called O'Donnell, who was eager to talk. He gave me the lists of everyone in his organization, along with their telephone numbers, and he asked his lawyer to fax me copies of the contracts they had received from producers.

When we met briefly in Midland the next day, he was genial and excited, and seemed savvy in the ways of reporters. He spelled his name several times, offered that he was comfortable with a tape recorder should I prefer it to a notepad and spoke slowly, in quotable fragments, when I chose to use a pen.

"I hate to see it split the rescuers like this," he said. "But our story is the real story -- we were the major players. I want the best movie. One that my great-great grandkids can see."

The other group, he said, met every Tuesday night in a banquet room of the downtown Hilton, and, by all accounts, stood around and yelled at each other. Knowing that, I had arrived on a Tuesday. He offered to come along to that meeting with me, saying that many of the members of the volunteer group knew him, and, even though they were at odds at the moment, maybe he could help smooth my way and make some introductions. I wasn't nearly as confident as he that he would be received as a calming presence, and tried to talk him out of the idea, but, as it happened, we never found out. Those in charge of the meeting canceled it at the last minute because they had heard that an "infiltrator" was planning to "disrupt" their proceedings. Robert? Me? They weren't specific.

Robert was disappointed with my article, which described the in-fighting in detail and quoted people who used words like "childish" and "greedy." He called me in my office in Houston to explain that he was really just trying to protect the integrity of Jessica's story. I think he really believed that. I heard from him four times, that I remember -- to announce that a blue-ribbon mayoral commission had selected a producer for the movie and that both groups would abide by the choice; to say that the actor Whip Hubley had been hired to play his role; to advise me of the date that the movie would be broadcast, and to ask if I knew a book agent who might help him sell his autobiography.

AS THE RESCUERS loudly turned on each other, much of Midland was, more quietly but just as nastily, turning on the McClures. When their daughter fell down a well, they were just two kids -- she with an outgrown shag haircut, he with aviator sunglasses and a wisp of a moustache. They were 16 when they were married, both sophomores in high school who would drop out soon after. (Eventually Cissy earned her equivalency diploma.) Cissy was a day-care worker in her sister's in-home child-care center -- the home with the pipe in the yard. Chip was a house painter. Suddenly the cameras were following their every expression as they stood clinging to each other in the tense backyard.

When it was over, Chip and Cissy tried to do the right thing. They took out two full-page ads in the months after the rescue, thanking everyone for everything. They granted interviews in their three-bedroom home in a new housing development outside of Midland, and the resulting articles chronicled the new possessions that came with fame. There were 30 stuffed animals on Jessica's bed, readers learned, along with 10 small handmade pillows. Her closet was crammed with fancy dresses (the pictures accompanying one article showed Jessica in yards of red velvet and white lace, next to the Christmas tree), play clothes and pajamas. "This is the kind of room you always dream about your child having," Cissy said.

With that, the rumor mill of Midland began to destroy that which it had created. And the rumors would reach as far as my office in Houston. Since the public had given Jessica all those things and all that money, they felt they had a right to talk about how it was spent. The fire chief, James L. Roberts, who helped organized the rescue, said: "They got mad at them because they were human." So Chip and Cissy gave more interviews, to bat at the whispers and innuendo.

"They're spending all of Jessica's money," the stories went.

No, Chip and Cissy said, the trust was under the control of a local bank and could not be spent on anything but her basic welfare until she was 25.

"They paid cash for that house," was the word over lunch at the country club, news delivered with one raised eyebrow.

Yes, Cissy said, $30,000, so that Jessica could "live a middle-class life."

"I heard they bought a Rolls-Royce and a Mercedes," people who had never met the McClures confided to other people who had never met them.

No, Cissy said, just a new Thunderbird and a new pickup, to get them around now that they lived miles from town.

"What kind of mother leaves her child alone like that?"

One who has to go inside, like mothers do all over America, Cissy said, to answer the telephone.

"I heard Cissy's being investigated by some agency."

She was. By the Texas Department of Human Services, Bureau of Day Care Licensing, who sent a letter saying that "there is reason to believe the child's injuries and the time spent in the well are the result of negligent supervision by child care provider Reba McClure." But no charges would be filed, a spokesman for the department said, because "the lady has been penalized enough by the horrible experience."

There were stories everywhere of how the fame had gone to the McClures' heads. "We were over at Denny's one day, soon after it happened, when she came in," says Marie Petronella, who still lives two doors down from the house with the well, and was out front with a garden hose on a recent June morning, trying to resuscitate her baked, shriveled grass. "There was a wait, and she looked at the guy and says, just like that: 'Do you know who I am? I'm Jessica's mother.' I said to her, 'If it wasn't for a whole lot of other people, you wouldn't be anyone's mother.' "

And everywhere there were rumors that the McClure marriage, shaky to begin with, was near collapse. "I read in The National Enquirer that I was having an affair with Jessica's mother," says Andy Glasscock. "It didn't help their marriage situation a hell of a lot, things like that." The couple divorced in 1990, and each has since remarried. "Chip was there for me more than anyone at the time," Cissy said in an interview with The Midland Reporter-Telegram. "And people think otherwise, but we're not at each other's throats."

The McClures were not the only ones feeling this downside of fame. Robert O'Donnell's co-workers began to call him "Robo-Donnell." They were tired of hearing about the rescue, annoyed that the world had bestowed on him an unfair share of the credit and angered by his hopes -- ones that never materialized -- that he could translate his moment of fame into something grander.

He never did find a book agent. And when the television movie finally aired, in May 1989, he was scheduled to work that night, and he had to beg his colleagues to switch shifts so that he could watch someone play him on TV. More than once, his chief, James Roberts, remembers calling O'Donnell into his office and warning him to climb off the pedestal before he fell. "You can't make a living as America's hero," he recalls saying. "Life goes on. Go on with yours."

Glasscock's marriage almost dissolved in the months after the rescue, because, he says, he began to believe he truly deserved the attention. "I became the Andy Glasscock," he says. "It really is an intoxicating thing. I was thinking: 'Hey, I'm somebody, I'm on TV. I'm in the newspapers all over the world.' My wife had a 6-day-old baby, and I'm jetting off to Cancun, Mexico, for hurricane relief. I jetted off to Hollywood to watch them make the movie. I didn't take my wife, I took my partner."

While O'Donnell and Glasscock were inflated with self-importance, Steve Forbes was feeling trapped. With each interview, each award, he felt as if he were giving away pieces of himself. Like Aboriginal tribes who believe that a photograph can steal the soul, he worried that soon there would be nothing left. He stopped returning telephone calls from the press.

"It reached a point where I said 'no more,' " he told me one recent afternoon, breaking his silence briefly to talk -- uncomfortably, and with an awareness of the irony -- about why he had imposed that silence in the first place. "There finally came a point where I had no family time. My family's real important to me. I'm not going to go out of my way to help someone get their story. It was taking away my life."

Eventually, the McClures, too, stopped talking about Jessica, and both Cissy and Chip refused to be interviewed for this article. Cissy told the Associated Press several years ago: "I know everyone loves her, but I love her too, and I just want her to be a kid like all the other kids she goes to school with. If we keep writing the baby Jessica story, my child will never be normal."

By all accounts, their approach worked. Jessica, friends and neighbors say, is a happy, feisty, active 9-year-old girl, whose hint of a limp and whisper of a scar are the only signs of what she went though.

"She's a wonderful little girl who needs to be left alone," said her grandmother, asking me, politely but insistently, to please go away.

"She rides her bike up and down the block and she has a dog," says Glasscock, who lives on the same block as Jessica. "She's just a normal kid. Her life is back to normal."

Glasscock says his life, too, is back to normal, but only because he went for counseling, at his wife's insistence. "She said: 'We can go to see a counselor, or we can go our separate ways,' " he says. "So I go bouncing in there, like I was Mr. Cool, and he pretty well says, 'She's right, you're a jerk.' And after we go through counseling for a while I figure out, well, I really am a jerk." He took down the rescue memorabilia that had all but covered his office, boxed it up and put it in the attic. He kept one item, and hung it on the wall at home -- the photo of the rescue that the McClures autographed.

But Robert O'Donnell couldn't seem to get past his past.

"Robert was stuck in a rut," Glasscock says. "He couldn't let it go. It got to the point where when you saw him coming, you went the other way."

Robbie O'Donnell agrees: "He would introduce himself to people, and wait for them to recognize him. If they didn't, sometimes they did, but usually they didn't, he would say, 'You might recognize my name because. . . . "

Eventually, his migraines came daily. Probably not coincidentally, so did thoughts of the rescue. "He said it went through his mind everyday," says his mother, Yvonne Poe, a sad, tired woman with a Texas-size shock of platinum hair. "Being down that hole, getting her out. And he said, 'Mom, I can't stop it, I don't know what to do.' "

One of the things he did was turn to prescription painkillers. He was often so sedated that he could barely speak. Robbie would test him before he got in a car with the boys, by asking him a few questions. If his speech was slurred she would take away the keys. He knew he was taking too many of the pills, Robbie says, and more than once, he tried to stop. "One day he threw them all away," she says. "But then he started taking so much aspirin that his stomach bled." Soon he was using the more powerful drugs again. "He was so sedated on the stuff he could not function," Robbie says. "I don't know how he went to work and drove an ambulance."

In April 1991, the medication cost him his marriage. Robbie asked him to move out at 4 o'clock one morning, after she woke up to find him passed out, fully dressed, with nearly all the lights on throughout the house, and all the doors unlocked and wide open. Then, in August 1992, the medication cost him his job. He had passed out at work early that year, and was taken by the department to a rehabilitation hospital, where he stayed for 30 days. A few months later, he was thought to be slurring his words at work, and, rather than take a drug test, he quit. "It was either quit or be fired," his mother says. "The rumor was that they were going to get rid of him one way or the other."

Yvonne's weary eyes flash at the suggestion that her son was addicted to drugs. Robbie, less angrily, but equally adamantly, says she doesn't think so either. "He wasn't a drug abuser, he just had those migraines," Yvonne says. "If he had something he could take, he would take it."

"The fire department felt he was abusing his drugs, which he wasn't," Robbie says. "He was just trying to find help with his migraines. And, I think, when he was taking that stuff, it would relax his mind and maybe he wouldn't think about that stuff that was bothering him."

Shortly before losing his job, O'Donnell moved 20 miles east of Midland, to Stanton, to live with his mother and stepfather, who raise cattle out there. If his moments of fame had given him visions of a grand future, they probably did not include this. What was once red paint on the ranch house is now blistered by age and wind. Beside the front door are a collection of steer skulls, bleached chalk white by the sun. Directions to the house give an idea of its remoteness: "Make a left at the stop sign," Yvonne says. "Drive 15 miles to the next stop sign. Then, in about a mile, we're the only house on the right."

For a year, he sent resumes to fire departments all over Texas. Four dozen of them. Included on those resumes was a list of the awards he had won because he rescued Jessica McClure. "He never heard back from a one of 'em," Yvonne says.

In the summer of 1993, he took a job with the Texas prison system in Huntsville, driving prisoners back and forth from the hospital. Christmas Eve he took too many pills, his mother says, and called home, almost too drugged to speak. She called the Huntsville police department, who broke into his apartment and took him to another rehabilitation hospital, where he remained for two days. Although he took some courses in an effort to become a drug counselor, he didn't work again until April of this year -- just days before he would kill himself -- when he began a training program with an asbestos-removal company in Lubbock.

He bought a new Ford pickup for the drives back and forth from Lubbock, a deep tan color, with a coppery stripe along the side. He seemed excited by the second chance. "He talked about how I would bring the boys up there for the weekend, and we could meet halfway and maybe have lunch or something," Robbie says. "It seemed like the bad stuff was in the past."

But then, on April 19, the past intruded onto the present. The inescapable scenes of the Oklahoma City rescue were eerily similar to the ones that, for years, had been filling O'Donnell's head. A race against time. Victims trapped in tight, unreachable spaces. Firefighters carrying wounded babies. He was watching television in his bedroom on the night of April 23, and he came into the living room, where Yvonne was folding the laundry, to ask her where she kept her shotgun shells. "He said he heard a snake out side," Yvonne says, "which is not unusual at our house." But a search of the yard with his stepfather found no sign of a snake. Yvonne went back to sorting the laundry, and Robert came out looking for the shotgun again. "It's O.K. where it's at," she told him. "There's no snake." Soon she carried his cleaned clothes into his room, and found him putting on his boots. The dog was growling, he told her, maybe at that snake. Yvonne opened the back door for him, to prove there was no rattler. Then she went to her own bedroom and went to sleep.

It was past midnight when she woke up and noticed that Robert's light was still on. When she went to turn it off, she saw he wasn't in his room. His new pickup was gone. The shotgun was gone. On the floor next to the coffee table were three pieces of paper, torn off a notepad, and laid out side by side. The first said, "No help from nobody but family," Yvonne says. "I didn't have to read the other two."

The family drove around all night, looking. It was the county sheriff's men along with Robert's younger brother who finally found him, at 8:30 the next morning, about 15 miles from his mother's home. He had pulled down a small ranch road, past the big stock tank, up into the mesquite trees, where he parked and shot himself in the mouth. Before he did, he took off the straw hat he always wore, the one his younger son loved, and wrote "To Chance" in black marker on the lining. It was a birthday present for his son, who would turn 11 the next month.

WHEN I FIRST HEARD OF Robert O'Donnell's death, the name was familiar, but I couldn't recall exactly which rescuer he was. Later, when I learned more of the details of his death, I was saddened by my first reaction. Here I was, one of the group of people whose attention was his goal and his curse, and I couldn't even place his name. Over the next few days, with the specter of Oklahoma City making every moment seem newly urgent, that sadness turned to a discomfort that came uncomfortably close to guilt. I learned long ago that to feel responsible for the aftermath of a story would make it impossible to do what I do. The new reality is that fame can come instantly to anyone, but, in the modern technological test tube, whether it creates a fizzle or an explosion depends upon the chemical with which it is mixed.

"I have a lot of people out there," said James Roberts, O'Donnell's fire chief, gesturing past the door of his airy office, where a photograph of himself with George Bush hangs on the wall over a single news clipping about the rescue. "I could line up 50 of them and I could tell you which ones would give you the interview and which ones would not. I could tell you which ones would seek out the publicity and which ones would not. Back in 1987, almost every day, I would give Robert O'Donnell a list of reporters who wanted to talk to him, and I'd give the same list to Steve Forbes. One of them would put it away and not take a second look at it. The other one would call every reporter on that list."

There were hundreds of men and women at the rescue. A handful of those lost their way. One never found it again. Not much of a toll, until you start to do the multiplication. In today's wired, cabled, satellite-linked world, with countless television stations and grand plans for countless more, there will be limitless lists like the ones James Roberts handed Robert O'Donnell. More news programs making more regular Joes into heroes, more talk shows needing an endless array of guests to revolve through their chairs, more and more lives to be fed to the insatiable machine. Thousands of people seeking the camera, or being sought by it. Some people will take it for the ephemera that it is, and, eventually go back to their lives. Others, like Robert O'Donnell, will try to, but fail.

Pensive for a moment, Chief Roberts lifts the latest copy of Fireman's Journal, with another familiar photograph on the cover -- a firefighter carrying the limp, bloodied body of 1-year-old Baylee Almon from the wreckage of the Federal building in Oklahoma City. The kind of hero O'Donnell wanted to go to Oklahoma to be. He stabs at the picture with his index finger. "I could tell him a thing or two," he says. "Boy, could I tell him."

There is a new fence around the backyard that made Midland famous, one that is more difficult to peer over, because people do still come to peer. Until recently, maps to the site were available to tourists at the front desk of the downtown Hilton. Cissy's sister moved out of the neighborhood years ago, and the house, worth about $23,000, has had three owners since then.

The infamous well is still there, of course, capped with its permanent message of victory and love. But the lush circle of chrysanthemums died years ago, says Maxine Sprague, who lived next door during the rescue, and still lives there now. "Nobody took to watering them," she says. The redbud tree was cut down sometime after that, also dead from thirst. All that remains is a sinkhole of parched dirt, dotted with a few brownish weeds.

There was no article about Robert O'Donnell's death in his hometown newspaper. There was only a longer-than-average death notice on the obituary page, giving a brief sketch of his life and listing the time and place of the funeral. "We didn't do much on it," said Gary Ott, managing editor of The Midland Reporter-Telegram, as he guided me toward the paper's McClure files.

"I didn't think it was big news," Ott explained. "What did he have to be depressed about? I could see if he found her down there dead, and he was haunted by that the rest of his life. But this was a success."

Hundreds of people came to the funeral. Some were men who used to consider one another friends, but who had grown apart since the battle over the movie rights. Steve Forbes was a pallbearer. Cissy was there with her father, and Chip came with his new wife.

As she walked back to her car, Robbie noticed a magazine photographer standing a distance away from the gravesite, taking pictures with a zoom lens. "Why do they have to be here now?" she said, loud enough to be heard by the photographer. "That's what started it all for Robert in the first place."

"Ma'am," said the photographer, who was now within arm's distance, "I'm just here doing my job." Then she hitched her camera onto her shoulder, and turned to walk away. With an anger Robbie didn't realize she felt, she shoved the photographer hard enough to make her stumble forward. It felt good, she said.

Photos: Robert O'Donnell minutes after he helped end Jessica's -- and America's -- underground ordeal. Once he had a taste of fame, he was hooked. (THE MIDLAND REPORTER-TELEGRAM/GAMMA-LIAISON); CNN's live coverage of the rescue was seen in 3.1 million households. (CNN)(pg. 18-19); O'Donnell, right, and Steve Forbes, who carried Jessica out of the shaft on a backboard. (MARY FRANCES BEVERLEY/EMERGENCY MAGAZINE)(pg. 21); Andy Glasscock on the beat in Midland, Tex. He has packed up most of his rescue memorabilia. O'Donnell's family outside the house where he spent his troubled last years. From left: His wife, Robbie, son Casey, mother, Yvonne Poe, and (seated) son Chance. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAURA WILSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. 22-23); A Pulitzer Prize view from atop a cherry picker's basket. (PHOTOGRAPH BY SCOTT SHAW/ODESSA AMERICAN)(pg. 38); Suddenly the whole world was watching Midland, Tex., but all too soon, the gaze turned into a glare. Top left: A rescue volunteer with a proud token of his efforts, a photograph signed by the McClures. (BILL NATION/SYGMA); Top middle: A billboard in the heart of Midland. (O'DONNELL FAMILY); Top right: Oprah Winfrey's personal reward to Robert O'Donnell, who had appeared on her show. (O'DONNELL FAMILY); Middle left: A float from the parade in Midland 13 days after the rescue. (BILL NATION/SYGMA); Middle right: Jessica McClure's return appearance at the White House, two years later. (DIANA WALKER/GAMMA LIAISON); This time, O'Donnell wasn't invited. Bottom left and right: The good news according to ABC and People. (ABC NEWS)Even the media seemed to pat themselves on the back after Jessica was rescued. (pg. 20)

Lisa Belkin is a contributing writer for the Magazine. Her last article, "Kill for Life," about abortion protesters, appeared in October 1994.